Saline Injections for Knee OA: Likely Therapeutic

New work presented at the recent meeting of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons indicates that intra-articular normal saline (IA-NS) injections may indeed have a therapeutic effect. The meta-analysis, entitled, “The Therapeutic Effect of Intra-articular Normal Saline Injections for Knee Osteoarthritis,” appeared in the December 27, 201+ edition of The American Journal of Sports Medicine.

Dr. Yanke commented to OTW, “Increasingly, new injection products are coming to market for the treatment of symptomatic osteoarthritis. The concern is that while many injections have been proven to be safe, we have a paucity of data on the efficacy of these treatments. Typically the highest level of study to evaluate this is a randomized prospective study with a known control or existing treatment. While in some ways, proving new treatments are better than existing treatments may be adequate, many trials have a placebo control to the study. This placebo treatment is typically saline only and theoretically should have no therapeutic effect. In reality, some treatments are demonstrating that they do not yield more improvement than placebo, but this is not for the reasons one may expect. When you drill down deeper, it turns out the saline groups show clinically meaningful improvement in their symptoms as well. As more trials are developed to try to bring new products to market it is important to make sure we are truly using the negative control that we believe we have.”